Best Android news and weather apps

The Web is awash with news and it's already hard enough to keep up with it all when you're sitting at your desk. Fortunately, the mobile phone is an excellent way to take care of the catching up when you're on the move but the tricky part is all the slow browsing you're going to need to do over mobile broadband in order to get the job done. Thankfully, this is where apps come into play.

Naturally, there's plenty out there to choose from, so we've put together a list of the best Android news and weather apps for you to take your pick from. Of course, you're equally welcome to download the lot and see which works best for you.

UK Newspapers Online

UK Newspapers Online is probably the clearest name for an app you could ever imagine. It's only missing the word "portal" really and that's because that's what this piece of software is all about. The app comes to your phone as a big list of newspaper publications from all over the UK to which you can add the Weston-super-Mare Bugle, the Plymouth Argus, the Slough Herald or whatever your local rag happens to be called.

Click on any in your list, which you can group together as you see fit, and the app takes your straight through to each publication's news website optimized for mobile so long as that's possible. There's really not any more to it. Uncomplicated, not a life-saver but it is convenient.

Google Reader

RSS might not be the darling of the Internet in the latter years of web-life but it's still an important part of getting your news together. For many, it's all about Google Reader and there's really no place that that's going to be delivered better as an on-the-go experience than on an Android smartphone.

Reader lets you follow all your favourite blogs and sites, see what your friends are reading and recommending and allows you to share your most interesting finds very easily too. Naturally, it also syncs with the Google Reader application accessed via your computer browser so as to keep both version up to date on exactly where you are with your daily nose through the papers.

Read it Later Pro

Another way to aggregate and queue up your news from round the web is to use Read it Later Pro. This time the experience isn't all about fire hose RSS but instead you can manually pick and choose individual pieces you like the look of to peruse at your leisure when you've got more time to do so. What's really key about the way this app handles it is that you can do so even when you're offline.

Read it Later Pro automatically syncs your reading queue across all devices, which includes what you've added via your Firefox or Chrome desktop browser, and presents all the copy correctly formatted for your specific gadget and with all of the photos, videos and other media exactly where it should be. Now, there is a free version you can try but we're recommending the full fat flavour so that there's no limits as to how many articles you can queue.

Yahoo! Weather

The unique thing about Yahoo! Weather is that is isn't just a straight weather app, it gives you a little more visual excitement than some apps. We're not talking about icons or animations, but real photos showing the weather conditions at your chosen location. The images are sourced from Project Weather, a group started by Yahoo, so these really are community sourced images.

The weather is supplied by The Weather Channel and comes with all the normal options, but you also get links through to the original image, with full credit to the photographer. It comes with a widget, which is a little small, but also gets the background image, so it makes for an app that is a little different from your average weather solution. Read more

UK Weather

The first thing to note is that UK Weather is tied into the Met Office data at its source, so there's one tick right there. As you might expect, it'll overlay a weather forecast of the present and coming conditions onto a simple but attractive graphic map of the UK or any of its more local regions. It'll break that down into mini-summaries of 3-hour intervals anywhere between now and up to 5 days in advance.

The fun comes in, however, because you can hit the settings button and switch from Weather into an assortment of other forecasts - Rainfall, Temperature, Wind, Cloud, Pressure and even UV as well. Very useful indeed.

If you prefer, you can even put it into Radar mode to watch conditions change automatically.The UK Weather app is completely free but, if you wish to rid your experience of those pesky ad banners, you'll have to stump up for the premium version, which is basically the same thing, and costs £2.50 per year for a subscription. If this is the kind of app you'll use on a daily basis, which we think you might, then you'll find it well worth the outlay. Read More

Go Weather

The first thing to get excited about is that Go Weather is skinnable, so if it's that HTC look you're going for, then you'll be pleased to see that there's a theme available to ape that design. But there are dozens more available too, all of which look pretty well-designed and should cater to most tastes. Themes are applied, and even downloaded, via the application itself too, which makes getting a new look nice and simple. In addition to widget themes, there are also animated designs that adorn the full screen application, which runs the whole thing and gives out some more detailed information, with pretty videos to illustrate the weather.

Then there's the widget, which sits on your home screen giving you updates about the time and state of the weather. There are three possible sizes available, so you can select the one that best suits the existing layout of your phone. The little ones aren't as pretty, but they still get the information across. Within the full-screen app, there are forecasts for the next week. Very handy, and it looks good, too. What more could you want?Read More

Then there's the widget, which sits on your home screen giving you updates about the time and state of the weather. There are three possible sizes available, so you can select the one that best suits the existing layout of your phone. The little ones aren't as pretty, but they still get the information across. Within the full-screen app, there are forecasts for the next week. Very handy, and it looks good, too. What more could you want?Read More

News and Weather

Smartphones are all about content and one of the most important areas for us modern day people is news; in this case News and Weather. The app pulls in the headlines from the Google News RSS and presents then in easily digestible form, i.e. on a black background. Finger the news and it’ll take you through to the full story where you can absorb the details until suitably saturated.

What’s quite nice about it is that you can pick and choose which categories to include in your current affairs fix and which to ignore and it also knows what publications and weather are relevant to you based on your GPS location. The app itself comes pre-installed on all Android devices and there's a rather spiffing widget that comes with it. Do make sure to add it to your desktop.

Market: Pre-installed

Price: Free

Rating: 4/5

Pulse

Pulse is essentially a clever content retrieval application where you have full control over the content that you see. It relies heavily on the quality of the feeds that go into it and the results from different sources will vary accordingly. But Pulse is one of our top Honeycomb apps, if not the current top Honeycomb app simply because it works beautifully on the large screen. Pulse divides itself into a number of different tab pages, starting with Top and Social and followed by a number of additional pages that you can customise to your needs.

Pulse offers up a number of featured sites, but if you decide you want news from elsewhere, you can simply search for a feed by tapping in the site URL or a keyword. You can also add your feeds from Google Reader. The feeds then fall into neat lines so you can scroll along a particular source for more stories, or up and down the page to get to more of your sources. Click on a story you like the look of and it will open up in a preview page, which will let you read all the content of that story feed. It’s a slick, considered and useful application which really looks good on the big screen of a tablet. Read more